Last active Feb 16, 2017

You can now create prose-only blocks on bl.ocks.org by creating a Gist with a single file: README.md. When your Gist is missing an index.html file, <bl.ocks.org> will hide the example iframe but continue to display everything else. And thus you can use your README as a quick and convenient way of posting text with less clutter than the default GitHub UI.

Funnily enough, I added this feature because the GitHub Gist API recently developed a bug: when listing a user’s gists, the files hash for each gist is empty. I previously filtered gists based on the presence of an index.html file. By removing the filter, bl.ocks.org is now immune to the bug, but I had to make a corresponding change to the Gist display page.

Oh, and you can still embed code in your prose, and it will be syntax-highlighted: